FRAMEWORK OF MENTORSHIP - 4 STAGES AND UNDERLYING SKILLS

Mentoring centers on the creation of a safe and healthy relationship between a mentor and mentee. Our mentoring framework identifies 4 critical stages every mentor and mentee goes through:

CONNECT: Our first relationship stage helps mentor and the mentee establish trust, consistency and reliability in the relationship.By the end of this stage, mentors and mentees feel comfortable around each other.

Empower: In this stage, mentees work on those facets of their lives that they would like to empower through the mentoring. Mentors and mentees practice different life skills that can help them achieve their goals.

Level: In the second stage, we remove implicit and explicit power differences between our mentors and mentees. We establish a mutual or two-way relationship, where mentor and mentee both contribute to the relationship and learn from it.

Evolve: In this final stage, mentees work on their future life choices. Mentors help mentees in their decision-making. Mentors and mentees also reflect on their mentorship and decide the next stage of their own journey.

To help mentors and mentees in their journey to build an empowered relationship we have created a toolkit of 18 different life skills and work skills. Adapting from the UNICEF classification of skills, we’ve uniquely applied these skills to a mentorship context. Mentors and mentees practice them throughout the relationship.

Program Typology

In crowded classrooms and under-resourced communities, there are many children facing unique conditions of family, economic and individual risk. These risk factors if unnoticed and unaddressed can contribute to adverse outcomes like dropout or risky behaviours. Adolescence as a period of development is also a critical inflection point. As children mature, ideas of independence, self-identity, and the practice of autonomy become increasingly important. In our life skills mentoring program, we identify children facing conditions of high-risk, for an intensive 3 year intervention from class 8 to class 10. The goal is to equip the children with life skills to make a successful transition from high school.

Mentee age group

13 - 15 years

Mentee identification

Govt Schools, Shelter Homes

Place of Mentorship

Community, School, Mentor Together Office

Duration of program

6 - 8 hours per month for a period of 12 months

Mentoring Curriculum

Life Skills toolkit of 80 hours

Cities

Pune, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi

India’s higher education system contributes about 3.5 lakh engineers and 2.5 million graduates, of which an estimated 5 million remain unemployed at any given time. There is an urgent need to invest early in young people in shaping their beliefs and orientation about work, and giving them actual career-focused learning opportunities. On the other side of this picture, in large work-forces around the world, employees, young and old alike, want greater meaning in their work; a desire to connect outside of the narrow confines of their formal roles. Our work skills mentoring program uniquely combines these two needs to create opportunities for young people to engage with professionals, at their work places; to understand and learn the skills sets needed to shape long lasting, meaningful careers.

Mentee age group

18 - 21 years

Duration of program

6 - 8 hours per month for a period of 10 months

Mentee identification

NGO partners like the Foundation for Excellence, India Trust and Magic Bus

Place of Mentorship

Mentors workplace, Mentor Together Office, NGO Partner Office

Mentoring Curriculum

Life Skills toolkit of 60 hours

Cities

Pune, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi

The need for mentors is even greater outside of tier 1 cities, where young people have few role models to access and learn from in their immediate networks. Recognizing this need, we’re going mobile - developing a customized service on mobile for adolescents girls and a web-based program for young engineering students.

Mentor To Go

Mentee age group

15 - 18 years

Mentee identification

Communities in rural Karnataka predominantly for the pilot

Medium of Mentorship

Phone calls via a customized program app

Duration of program

6 - 8 hours per month for a period of 10 months

Mentoring Curriculum

Life Skills toolkit

For more information

www.mentortogo.org

Foundation for Excellence

Mentee age group

18 - 21 years

Mentee identification

NGO partner - Foundation for Excellence India Trust

Medium of Mentorship

Video calls and phone calls

Duration of program

4 - 6 hours per month for a period of 8 months

Mentoring Curriculum

Work Skills toolkit of 32 hours

Our Impact

Outreach

5

Cities

4

Peri Urban Areas

4000

Mentees

700+

Mentors

Our Impact on Mentees

Mentees in our work-skills program have shown a statistically significant increase in theirCareer Maturity, Emotional Maturity and General Well-Being assessments post mentorship.